


Perfume

by Leyenn



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:19:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loss changes people. It definitely changes Rogue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perfume

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilerish up to _X2_.

Everywhere, everywhere he could smell her. Jean.

She knew, because sometimes she would pick up the scent herself, in the laundry room when she went for her sheets or in the tooled leather of her uniform, still stiff and new, wrapped too tightly around her skin. She knew because he walked the corridors of the mansion with a look of painful loathing in his eyes that only she could bring herself to see.

She knew because she heard him outside at night, prowling the grounds. Protecting them where he'd failed her.

More often than not he would pass under her window two, three times, and every time she heard the _snikt_ of claws out and ready. Once or twice, she would hear more than that; and when she slipped out of class in the morning there would be three strikes more on the tree outside.

No one else noticed.

By the time the kids were building snow mutants on the lawns outside, she was in the Danger Room every day. Bobby's pretences faded at the end of fall; Jean's presence followed her now everywhere she went. Not enough to be lost, but to be the one memory that wouldn't fade - she saw her, everywhere, in every face that wouldn't let anyone forget. Storm trained her in half-silence because Scott refused to watch another life battled away in a hopeless cause. She pretended she'd never heard him shouting that, nor that it had been Logan who insisted.

He never came to watch, but she knew he saw what she was trying to become. The footprints under her window stopped at New Year's.

Scott shut her out of the first mission out, taking Kurt instead. Storm apologised in quiet tones outside the jet and promised to take care of him. _Even though,_ she said, and Rogue stopped her before she could finish. _Yes, even though. I still care._

In the world now, it was just safer to be alone.

She took to wandering the corridors while they were away, just in case. Standing at the window she could watch him, slipping through the trees, watchful. Wary.

Nice, sometimes, not to be alone all by herself.

She didn't really remember when life became a trial to be passed, and with pride; when she started opening the door with one glove loose. About the time Jubes and Kitty and the others started to forget, she suspected, but she couldn't go back into that troubled, ignorant life with them. Because Jean had died for not believing in her power and Rogue wasn't about to do the same.

When the note appeared in her locker, only the part of her that had been Bobby was surprised: a room number, and it wasn't his, but he was waiting for her when she went up.

"Hi."

He watched from the edge of the desk as she closed the door carefully behind her. "Hey."

She laid her gloves neatly across the corner of a polished dresser. The room was bigger than his; double bed, wardrobe, the desk, the dresser, all in polished wood. A thick rug squashed under her boots. She could see a bathroom door in the corner and bags all over the floor. Hers. "What's all this?"

He shrugged. "Thought it was about time."

Her smile had long since forgotten to be shy. She looked around. "There's no window. You'll have to start walking inside."

"Safer this way." He paused, without saying, _I don't protect you, now_. "Unless, you wanted-"

"It's great." She laid a pale hand on the arm of his shirt and squeezed. Squeeze hard enough and sometimes you could feel the claws resting inside. She felt the same about herself sometimes, these days. "Thank you."

"Pleasure."

When she reached for her gloves that first morning, there was a ball chain twined through the fingers. A chain, new, silver, but no tag. She took the message and walked to breakfast with it around her neck. Finding him at a corner table with his shirt open at the collar, they matched.

"Thought we could be alone together," was all he said. She smiled and squeezed his hand as she sat down. He slipped out a single claw, slowly, just a reminder. She rubbed a satin finger along its length and ate her cereal with the other hand.

The fourth time Scott blanked her for a mission, she wrote a note herself and slipped it under Logan's door. _0100\. Danger Room. Bring the claws._

And he did, because he was the only one who would.

Sitting afterwards in the kitchen, bruised and throbbing with lost energy, she finally told him about kissing Bobby. Letting him know there was another in her head after him was somehow more painful than the bruises.

"Are you lonely, Logan?"

He shrugged over his beer. "Sure, sometimes."

"But not all the time?"

"What is this, an inquisition?" He scowled at her, but she knew better than to pay attention. He growled around the neck of the bottle for a moment. "No, not all the time."

"Good." She loosened her hair from its tie. "I was just - since Jean -"

The bottle cracked in his fist, beer trickling over the table. "Jean was a mistake."

"Logan..."

"'Girls choose the good guy.'"

"Most girls," she admitted. Jubes said she was 'cracked' to ditch Bobby, and it was really all the same. Sometimes it was healthier to be in pieces. "Most girls aren't dangerous."

"Most women," he corrected her clearly, digging a sliver of glass out his hand and watching her not flinch in the corner of his vision. "Most women. And don't you start pretending it's not a good thing."

"Most women can touch."

His hand was still bleeding when he grabbed hers. "That's not always a good thing."

"Logan..."

"I'll get used to it." He clenched his fist. She didn't squirm away, although she could. "I'll do it so that you can. I take my chances."

She watched with a fascination the veins shifting in his arm, the cold tones slipping into his skin, the way he shuddered when he let her go. She felt him uncurl and burn at the back of her mind, long-lost and welcomed.

The first afternoon she opened the door with her gloves left in her room, it was Bobby's parents on the other side.

Rogue stood on the staircase, watching as they sat and talked; when she caught Mrs. Drake watching her in return, she slipped out a slim, creamy middle claw and a smile and kept her gaze focused. Wary. Just in case.

She hadn't noticed, waiting to see them leave, that not even standing here smelt like Jean any more.

  


*

  



End file.
